


Ghosts That We Knew

by CalamityBean



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon compliant as of 4.06 but who knows what's gonna happen by 4.10, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, Post-Series, Reconciliation, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-22
Updated: 2017-08-12
Packaged: 2018-12-05 11:07:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11576823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CalamityBean/pseuds/CalamityBean
Summary: With the war at an end, Edmund Hewlett takes possession of Whitehall and does his best to settle into a life of science, scholarship, and solitude. But Anna Strong has returned to Setuaket as well, and the more their paths cross, the more they both realize that it is not such a simple thing to move on.





	1. Paper

**Author's Note:**

> It's finally happened: I've named a fic after a song title. 'Twas only a matter of time.
> 
> This is an expansion / revision of a very tiny little story I posted on [my tumblr](http://calamity-bean.tumblr.com/post/163111959652/how-do-you-think-theyre-going-to-resolve-the) earlier this week and decided I liked well enough to give it my usual treatment of unnecessary verbosity. Because why stay at 800 words when it could be, like, idk ... probably 10,000? There will be two more chapters after this; fair warning that the rating will go up to Explicit on the final one. Hope you enjoy!

The first thing Edmund notices upon his return to Setauket are the ghosts.

For once in their strange and sordid acquaintanceship, Abraham Woodhull proves as good as his word. There comes a day when Edmund lifts his head at his writing desk in York City and realizes that he has not heard the sound of drums in a week. Nor soldiers marching, nor muskets being fired in drills—all of it has floated out on the ebb tide with the frigates and their guns. Every time a warship vanishes from the harbor, a diminutive fishing sloop takes its place. It is rather, thinks Edmund, like watching the snow melt. Thoughts of snow still make him shudder, in truth; each winter spikes a thread of fear through him and makes his phantom toes twitch. The point is that the metamorphosis from war to peacetime is a transition so slow and subtle that when he _finally_ notices it’s nearly accomplished, the change comes, paradoxically, as a shock.

And at the end of it, young Woodhull— _the_ Woodhull, now—comes to him with hand outstretched, bearing the deed to a house Edmund once dared call home.

“Congratulations, Major,” grins Abraham, managing, nobly, to limit himself to only nominal sarcasm in either word.

The boy must have come straight from the notary’s: the deed is new, the letters as crisp as the paper they are written upon and the ink still half wet. Edmund accepts it with caution—afraid, absurdly, to let the edges graze his skin.

Whitehall has become a tomb since Richard passed. The first time he sets foot within the dark, musty foyer, he has the uncomfortable impression of being a graverobber of the sort he sometimes glimpsed during university in Edinburgh, delivering their gruesome cargo to the medical buildings in the dead of night. Half the Woodhulls’ possessions remain in their rooms, blanketed by a thick layer of dust. He shall have to ask the men delivering his own belongings to repack the Woodhulls’ and deliver them safely to the farm once they’ve finished unpacking his own.

And that is when Edmund first realizes the terrible miscalculation he has made. For soon, the floors are littered with wood shavings as well as with his books, his astrolabes, his telescopes and garments and crystal decanters and folios of Handel, and the house smells of cedar for days; soon, the gaps in the walls are filled with new paintings, scenes of hunts and stately houses on the Lothian moor, and the bookshelves crammed so full that he must resort to stacking homeless volumes on any flat surface that won’t buckle beneath their weight. But still, one glaring fact remains. For the laborers must construct _more_ boxes in order to transport even the _fraction_ of Woodhull possessions that remain here, and when those are gone and Edmund is left alone, he must face geometry’s cold hard truth:

The sum of a bachelor’s life simply is not equal to an area intended for whole generations of family and staff.

He can purchase more furnishings, yes. Hire a maid, a cook, a stablehand, give a few humbler quarters over to them; he can fool himself into believing that Abraham and Mary’s old room may one day be needed for guests, and convert little Thomas’s nursery into a study for his research, since that is, after all, the only legacy Edmund will leave behind. But he has taken a haunted house, and there are only so many dark corners into which he can push the ghosts—of old friends, old enemies, old moments he would rather forget.

It is one thing, for instance, to lower the lid of the harpsichord, lay the fallboard down over the keys, and weigh both down with books. It is quite another to stop himself ever from glancing up at the landing of the stairs. At times, he must close his eyes simply to walk upstairs, lest he fall into a sudden memory of looking up at that stairwell with his heart in his throat and his smile stretching from ear to ear at the sight of a woman in white and gold.

Yet even in the town there is no escape, for Setauket has haunts of its own—and _oh_ , they are a still more perilous breed. For _they_ do not keep to dark corners; _they_ walk boldly in the light. They bare their gaunt faces and hollow light to the sun. And it does not matter that their blood still flows within them, for they are ghosts all the same: the revenants of people not seen, heard from, or spoken of in years. As good as dead in the hearts and minds of those who once knew them … Till they come wandering back from their distant graves to a town they scarcely recognize, and which scarcely recognizes them.

Soldiers. Camp followers … Congressmen.

Spies.

And in a hamlet so small as Setauket, it is only a matter of time before his path crosses hers.

 

\---

 

“Major…”

“…Mrs. Strong.”

He is not, of course—a major. Not anymore. _Major Hewlett_ , commander of the garrison at Setauket and Long Island, would never have graced the weekly market that springs up around the well with his presence, and certainly he would never have done so looking like this. There is something shatteringly vulnerable in seeing him alone, blinking into the sunlight in the middle of the road, with ink beneath his fingernails and a parcel beneath his arm and his own hair worn beautifully black and long. She has seen him vulnerable; she has seen, he suspects, more sides of him than anyone else in this hemisphere. But never has she seen him since he shed his cardinal’s plumage for a summer coat of cream and sage and brown. The hair frames his face with an elegance that that peruke had never allowed him, and the colors bring out hues in his skin she hadn’t noticed before whereas the red only ever washed him out. He looks more tanned now, more … rustic. Freckled across the bridge of his nose.

And as for _Mrs. Strong_ …

Anna thinks of a letter en route to Philadelphia, and draws a deep and shuddering breath.

But what else can they call each other? Now that all other names cut too close? So she swallows the syllables poised in her throat and says simply, “You’re—settling in well, I hope. At Whitehall.”

“...It is quieter than I recalled.”

As is everything now. Strong Manor included. That had relieved her in the beginning, but now she finds it difficult to sleep without the hum of soldiers’ voices surrounding her, despite how that same cacophony had driven her mad in camp. What is the quiet at Whitehall like, she wonders? Does he prefer it to York City, abuzz with city life? Does he regret choosing Setauket’s seagulls and lush summer crickets livening the night, when he could instead have chosen the creaking of timber and the lapping of waves against a ship?

One, she would have known the answer from his face. But there are angles in his jawline now that are illegible to her, and new crows’ feet she cannot parse.

There is a ghost Anna carries deep within the four armored chambers of her heart that is _almost_ Edmund Hewlett, but not quite. Time has faded it, and the pain it causes her to look at it has caused her to lock it away tight, seldom exposing it to daylight but always aware of its weight. Now and then, she lets herself run a hand over it long enough to relearn some inconsequential thing: the shape of his lips when he smiled; the exact lilt of his voice on a word she can almost, _almost_ recall. As well as sensations less quantifiable, but more meaningful in their inexact way:

The warmth of his shoulder not quite touching hers.

The comfort of simply being near him, his mere presence soothing the tension from her shoulders and the worries from her frayed nerves—and the flutter in her belly when she caught him staring at her, or caught _herself_ staring at him, and they both flushed.

The cold, nauseated twisting of her stomach as she sat across from him in a coffeehouse far from home and forced herself to meet his hollow eyes.

They are only splinters of moments, their context eroded like sand, that against all odds have remained trapped beneath her skin—but she would not be rid of them for the life of her, no matter how they sometimes ache. Yet a patchwork of minutiae can never truly account for the shape of the whole thing. Especially not when so long has passed. Oh, how she’d _grasped_ for more details when she saw Abe again, voice tremulous, heart bloody in her hands, demanding to know everything: how he’d looked, what he’d wanted, what he’d said—

_What do you want me to say, Anna? He looked older. Looked wearier. Don’t we all._

_But did he look happy?_ she’d pressed, horrified to realize that even she wasn’t certain whether she wanted to hear yes or no. Abraham had regarded her a long moment before answering that. When he did, she felt something shatter in her heart.

_He looked like he could be, in time._

Watching the major shift his weight off his bad foot and not quite meet her eyes, she can’t tell yet whether enough time has passed or not. All she knows that here, now, in the bright full colors of peacetime, beneath the blue banner of skyline that frames his dark hair and spills seamlessly into the bay, there is too much space around them now and not enough between.

“And you?” he ventures, stilted. The traffic of the market flows around them; his words stumble into the gaps between footsteps and conversations not their own. “I trust you and … I trust you both are. Settling back in.”

 _Tell him, tell him, tell him—_ It would be so simple—and yet—

And yet there is a pane of glass between them now, but it only exists because of a mutual agreement to pretend that it must. Just as she never turns her face toward Whitehall and not once has seen him silhouetted in the tavern door. And the thought of how easily she could shatter it leaves Anna unable to breathe.

“I…” His eyes meet hers, reluctantly. They seem darker now, narrower, but then something flickers in their depths. “Actually, I—I’ve not…”

“You’ve not…?” he prompts, and the way his eyebrows lift with a tiny shake of his head is a gesture so familiar that it pulls the words from her right then and there.

“What I mean to say is—Selah and I, we—”

Two young women, arms linked and heads bent close whispering, pass between them. It’s the breaking of a spell.

“I have to be going,” blurts Anna, flushing hot, and has fled halfway home again before she realizes she never bought the calico she’d gone to the market for in the first place.

 

\---

 

It was only few moments. Only a few words.

It was enough.

The next morning, Anna catches herself looking up to Whitehall and realizes with a quiver of fear and elation that the imaginary barrier between it and Strong Taven has finally, irreparably broke.

But that is its own hazard: for now their history lies scattered between them in razor-edged shards, and they both must tread carefully lest they cut themselves on the glass. Setauket is a small town, however, and there are only so many different paths she can take in navigating it.

One day, she rounds the smithy on her way to the water pump and stops dead at the sight of him leaving the tailor, strangely striking in the mundane act of donning his hat. Her feet stutter to a stop; her heart is the clanging of the smithy beating his anvil. By the time the major looks up from beneath his tricorn ( _and squints thoughtfully_ , she imagines, able to envision it perfectly, _and frowns at the feeling of something just missed_ ), she’s flattened herself around the corner again, hand pressed to the front of her stays.

A few days later, she’s taking down the laundry behind the manor, listening to the gulls wheeling over the bay at her back, when she pulls down a broad flagging sheet and glimpses, far beyond it, a man on a tall white horse. There are many such horses, she tells herself, stilling with the sheet in her arms. And it is no strange thing, after all, to glimpse men on all manner of horses riding all directions in and out of town. But for all her talents in lying even to those she admires most, Anna has never been adept at lying to herself.

So it goes, and the days slide one into another like melting wax, and Anna finds herself growing accustomed to doing exactly what she knows she should not: seeking out the shape of him everywhere she looks. Each encounter is a little more dangerous than the last. _There’s no harm in it_ , she tells herself, and lets her eyes linger on him a moment longer than they did before. But there is a strange allure in the glittering sharpness of the glass. Every day, she edges a little closer toward it, though never quite close enough to wound.

How many times has she spied on him before she thinks to ask the question? Before the day when she pretends to be examining peaches in the market but, in truth, is looking beyond the covered stalls toward the farrier’s, where he stands with the reins in one hand and the other smoothing over his horse’s neck as the farrier nails on a shoe. Only _then_ , when he looks up with unerring precision and his eyes briefly meet hers, does she suddenly think to wonder: How many times in the weeks since their last meeting has she failed to notice _him_ watching _her?_

The thought sends a flush of heat through her: a shiver from her nape to her navel and down through the meeting of her tight-pressed thighs. That night, Anna smooths her hand low down her belly and twists the fabric of her nightgown taut. Beneath the weight of her guilt and her sorrow, something courageous flickers within her breast. And finally, she lets herself wonder whether it would be such a terrible thing, really, to be cut.         

 

\---

 

“I’ve asked Selah for a divorce.”

Edmund startles halfway out of his skin, the book he’s spent the past hour immersed in nearly flying out of his hands. He catches it by a chunk of pages, feels a sharp sting as one crisp, gilded edge nicks the pad of his thumb, but that is nothing to the stabbing shock of hearing that voice. He sits in the shade of a pear tree upon a low pasture wall overlooking the beach and the bay, legs dangling over one side, and on the other side, close enough to touch if they both reached out their hands, stands a phantom in a pale floral shawl.

How long has she been watching him, he wonders, nerves buzzing, with those dark, inescapable eyes. He had not even heard her approach.

“Never fear, major. I’ve not come seeking charity or sympathy or anything like that. Nor do I mean to impose upon your peace.” Chewing on her lower lip, Anna lowers herself onto the very edge of the wall, facing the opposite direction as him with her back to the bay. The long slope of her profile is inscrutable, but her eyes are lined. “I simply felt you deserved to know.”

“... _Why?”_

“I’m not certain, to be honest. But it seemed right that you should.”

“No, I mean—” His free hand, the one not keeping Chaucer from tumbling off the cliff into the sea, grapples for words in the air. “So many years when you had no choice but to remain apart, and yet now, you could have … gone back to your lives. Set everything to rights and forgotten all the … the obstacles. And … distractions. That intervened.”

“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it. So long as the war was on, I didn’t _have_ to choose. Though there were times—” and she is not even looking at him, now, yet he has to close his eyes lest he wince “—when I thought I might.”

It is not that Edmund is afraid of her. Not in any mortal sense. The walls around his heart stretch high and thick and strong, and even in the darkest hours of the war, when he walked the streets of York City seeing assassins in every shadowed alleyway, he had never feared that hers would be the hand on the knife. After all: she had already dealt him a more lethal blow than Simcoe, Abraham, or any other man ever achieved. And whatever capacity for cruelty Mrs. Strong may possess, she is, if nothing else, far too pragmatic to carry on stabbing a corpse.

And yet the ease with which she’s lured him into this conversation _unnerves_ him. But for the space between them—two arms’ lengths, when once they might have sat with fingers interlaced—it is as though nothing has changed since their last golden summer together, and it is the most ordinary thing in the world that they should sit together in intimate conversation. Not to mention, given how isolated this piece of coastline is from town, in an intimate _privacy_ that … no longer seems proper, if indeed it ever was. At least in town, when he allows himself, guiltily but inevitably, to seek out her shape from afar, there are barriers between them physical and social alike. But the sight of her with her work-roughened hands and the wind tousling the hairs at her nape paralyzes him. The hot-smoke huskiness of her voice curls around the walls of his heart. And when he meets her eyes, fathomless, dark, like bottomless pits, he _knows_ that it was a trap all along, and that he has _fallen_ for it, dammit, played for a fool yet again—and yet cannot stop himself from tumbling deeper into her thrall with every word.

“We grew apart, Selah and I. Grew in different ways. Different soil nourishing us, different winds blowing our branches this way or that. Such that we scarcely even recognized the shape of one another anymore, much less fit together the way we might have once.”

“Do people ever.”

“Oh, I think sometimes they do. At least, I’d like to hope.”

At that, he can’t help but scoff: a bitter, self-satisfied huff. When she quirks her eyebrows at him in confusion, he amends wryly, “Well—my condolences, at any rate.”

A chuckle. “I wasn’t sure you’d care.”

“Believe me, I do not. Still, I am not insensible to the difficulties of … What I mean to say is—you have no one now. No husband, no protection … Not that you are—I know that you, of all people, are in very little need of that. But the fact that remains that you have no partner left to aid you, nor any companion to—”

“And who do you have, major?” Her eyes flick toward the horizon and the whitewashed walls gleaming there. “Up in that big empty house?”

Edmund’s jaw snaps shut. Stiffly, it works side to side, but there is something like rebellion and something like challenge in the stubborn blackness of her stare, and he _shall not_ back down.

“... _Plato_. Shakespeare. Hume and Brahe and d'Albert d'Ailly. I have _many_ companions, Mrs. Strong, and very fine company they are.”

“Gracious. There must scarcely be room for you all.”

“Yes, well—” He flushes, feeling ridiculously like a schoolboy again, hiding away inside the dormitories with his schoolwork while the other boys chased each other around the yard, and feeling even _more_ ridiculous for allowing her of all people to make him feel that way. “You will forgive me, madam, if I say that of all the acquaintances I have made in this country, I have found myself exceedingly more likely to be _kidnapped_ , _assaulted_ , or otherwise _betrayed_ by _people_ than by _books_.”

Mrs. Strong flinches as though slapped. Yet, absurdly, so does he. Even more so when, somehow, she pins a sorrowful little smile in place and lets her gaze fall down to his hand.

“Usually, at least.”

Only then, looking down, does Edmund realize that the papercut on his thumb has welled into a bright red line. Immediately, he folds it inside his fist, but too late: the damage is done. There is blood dulling Chaucer’s gold-limned pages and speckled upon his breeches over one thigh.

“...It is the least of my hurts.”

For a few moments, they sit in silence, listening to the waves crash against the cliffside and the crying of gulls. Mrs. Strong rises, startling him nearly as much as she had upon her initial approach, and walks unsteadily to stand by a nearby tree.

“If there had been any other way,” she whispers at last, strangled. Her back is to him; her hand, braced against the tree trunk, curls into the bark. “And if there were any way now I could convince you that I—that I truly, _truly_ lo—”

“No no, I—Madam, no.” Though his own voice is likewise soft, it feels as though it’s tumbling out of him uncontrollably, along with all his breath. Setting Chaucer aside to fend for itself, he swings his legs to the other side and half-stands, awkwardly, holding up a pacifying hand but not daring to approach. “Please, you have already apologized enough. Frankly, it would—pain me more to hear it again. And there is no need. I harbor no ill will, not anymore. Not toward you, nor Abraham, nor even Simcoe, for all his crimes. I am simply too _tired_ for that. It was war, and … we all did what we felt we must do.”

His fist clenches around his bleeding thumb, and his voice drops low and flat. “But absence of rancor does not mean absence of good sense. I have heeded well the lessons taught me by my time here. Lessons about my own nature, and about the nature of humanity at large. And as I said, I am simply … so very tired of struggling to find reason or justice or decency in a world with which I clearly did not see eye to eye. No, no. My vision is corrected now, I’m pleased to say. I see the inalterable baseness of life quite plain. And I have claimed my own little slice of the heavens, which is all I ever wanted, in the end.”

Mrs. Strong turned to face him as he spoke, but it is several moments before she responds. Her mouth hangs open; her eyes are wider than ever with shock. And in them, he sees terrible, sorrowful truth.

“ _Major_. You know very well that it is not.”

There is do defense he can mount against such a bald and brutal assault. Sticken, Edmund looks away.

“I don’t mean…” With the hand not clutching her shawl to herself, she attempts a gesture, half aborted, between herself and him. It’s barely a twitch of a finger and should not be powerful enough to hurt, yet he understands the translation perfectly, much as he wishes he did not: _I don’t mean me._ “But there were other things you wanted, once. Truth. Justice. A better world for all those who live in it, just as—just as I wanted, in my own way. I know you love letters and sciences for their own merits, and I do not doubt that they have great beauty in and of themselves. But there was a time you would never have been able to separate their value from … from the context of how art might shape a man’s spirit, or science guide mankind itself toward understanding and peace. There was a time you would not let the failings of others deter you from what you knew to be good.” Over the sweep of her shoulder, the shawl twists enough to reveal one collarbone, and he realizes that the hand gripping it is clenched knuckle-white. “There was a time you would have thought that worth any risk.”

“...Well. I suppose I, too, have changed.”

“Yes. Yes, I daresay you have.”

His heart is too heavy for this cliffside now. If he’s not careful, he’ll stumble and drop like a sea anchor onto the rocks. Stiffly, he retrieves Chaucer and tucks the wounded poet under one arm. “Good day, Mrs. Strong.”

“And yet—”

He’s already strides away from her, and he _shall not_ look back—but he can’t shut his ears to her words.

“Yet I thought I recognized you.”

For a moment, Edmund hesitates, rocking on the ball of his maimed foot. Then walks on.

 

\---

 

That night, Edmund cannot sleep. The house is too empty, his heart bearing him down into the mattress beneath its own weight, and sometime past midnight, he swears he hears the harpsichord lilting out an awkward yet earnest tune. He piles more books atop the fallboard on his way out to the telescope and drowns his sleeplessness in the stars.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading, loves! If you read the mini version of this, it probably still feels pretty familiar thus far; the remaining two chapters, which are currently in the revision/drafting stages, will diverge more. The title, of course, derives from the Mumford & Sons song of the same name. 
> 
> And as always, I would love to hear what you think!


	2. Splinter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As our heroes both settle back into the swing of Setauket life, Anna makes a decision, and Edmund goes for a ride.

This is a song Anna knows of old.

Tankards clattering, a percussion of metal and wood. The popping of logs in the fireplace, the scrape of people pulling out their chairs; Mr. Robinson’s even brought his fiddle to provide some proper strings. And above it all, the voices, raised in good cheer. Men laughing. Women visiting; children playing on the rug in front of the hearth. For the first time in years, all the gossip is of betrothals and crop prices, with no mention whatsoever of battles or drilling exercises or how the mattresses in the barracks are shite. Not for years has she heard such a tune. And yet, like one of the long-lost lullabies sung by her mother so long ago, Anna’s heart recalls the rhythm even if it has long since forgotten the words. And she dances it to it as gracefully as any fine lady of breeding, weaving easily between tables with her pitchers in hand.

“Ah, thank you kindly, Mistress Anna.”

“Mrs. Strong, more ale, if you please!”

“As I live and breathe—little Annie Smith. Child, so good to see you home. When’s that husband of yours plan to show his face in these parts again?”

The dance stumbles. Her footwalk falters a moment, but she finds the beat again with a tight stretch of her mouth. “Much work to be done in Congress, Mrs. Egerton. I’m sure Selah’s needed more there.”

On the pretense of fetching a fresh keg, Anna shuts herself in the cellar after that. She presses her back into the door and pulls in a long and shuddering breath. Just a moment’s respite, that’s all. To catch her breath before the next song begins.

Yet she knows even now that one day, the music will end.

With the departure of Colonel Cooke and his trade agreements—and with Tories rather less in favor now than they were a year ago—it had became swiftly apparent not long after her return to Setauket that dear Mr. Martin DeJong was in dire straits. Apparently the man so tight with his purse strings when it came to employees and patrons was ten times more generous at the gambling tables and had amassed debts for which he no longer had the income to settle nor the social standing to keep his creditors at bay. The pension provided Anna by the army is modest—necessarily so, given how few people know she even played a part—but enough to tempt a man in need of liquid assets fast.

“You had a good run of it, at least,” she’d ventured consolingly, driven by some odd instinct to offer comfort to this man who never showed any regard for her own. Five years ago, such an impulse would have been foreign to her—would, as likely as not, have manifested as a thirst for retribution instead. Now, she holds it close to her heart. “Kept the soldiers happy. Kept the town running smooth. You’ll find equal success in your next venture, I’m sure.”

DeJong scowled at her with his toad’s face stretched flabby and flat. Then, his scorn melting, shook his head and sighed.

“ _Verdomme_ , but you really mean it, ah. You should be smug, you know. It would be easier for me to reckon with, if you were smug. Lord knows I would have been, had fortunes gone otherwise in this accursed war.”

“I have no more appetite for strife, sir. Not with you nor anyone else. Healing is what we all need now.”

“Healing. Aye.”

Never had Anna considered Heer DeJong a contemplative man. Presumably, he _must_ have an interior life, as everyone does—thoughts, desires, theories, regrets—but as she had never glimpsed any of his mind’s inner workings beyond how he might devise to squeeze a few more coins into his purse, she’d imagined his must be a fairly shallow pool. So it was not without some surprise that she witnessed those small, shrewd eyes take on a nostalgic glaze.

“In my boyhood, when we lived with my grandmother near the _verdronken land_ of Saeftinghe, she would tell stories from her girlhood in Germany. There was one … pfff, I do not recall exactly. Something about lovers and betrayal and ships. I had no interest in such things then nor now, except perhaps for a sturdy ship. But I remember, there was a man who cut a viper dead in four pieces, and another snake that brought leaves to heal each cut. I think that is rather something, ja? That even when it seems all is over, and your life lies in pieces at your feet … Even then, there may be hope.”

Anna smiled, chest strangely tight. “Well, spring is come, sir. I hope you find your leaves.”

He’d snorted at that, and shaken his head. And then he’d handed over the deed—returning the tavern to her.

Which is to say, in reality, returning the tavern to her _husband_ —owner of everything that should have been hers.

Will Selah ever come to reclaim it? As she wipes down tables, she glances over her shoulder each time the door opens and startles, sometimes, at the momentary certainty that those are _his_ broad shoulders silhouetted against the light. If—when—he does … Anna has options. Friends who will never begrudge her a roof over her head. Reverend Tallmadge will not refuse a helping hand in setting the church to rights, surely, and old Widow Brewster has been trying to all but adopt Anna for most of her life. Besides: between her pension and her profits from the inn, by that time she might have savings enough to purchase a shop of her own outright, and never mind whether Selah wants the tavern back or not.

She could trade in fineries from York City, she muses as she washes tankards. Establish a partnership with Mr. Townsend in order to import the goods—or perhaps she should follow his example and invest in a coffeehouse. Those seem to be quite the fashion these days, do they not?

Sometimes she even fantasizes, with a strange sort of heartsickness, of winning some dead scholar’s collection at auction and opening the first circulating library on Long Island. But it’s a fool’s dream, she knows, the dream turning bitter on her tongue. Too few in Setauket have sufficient leisure or appetite for literature, and surely whatever rustic little library she can assemble will never hold anything special enough to tempt a man who already enjoys such _very fine company_ from his own.

(Almost every day now, she sees him. In shops. In silhouette. Walking along the bay. At night, she glimpses gold in the distant direction of Whitehall and wonders what it is that keeps his candles lit so late. But not since she told him of the letter has she dared tread near the glass again.

Sharing her secret with him had been easier than she expected: only a shallow cut. After all, it is not as though he’s thought her virtuous for a long time. But the _change_ in him. The bitter armor he wore now, crafted by Anna’s own hand. _That_ had cut deep.)

...Nonetheless.

The point remains: she has options. In Setauket, in York City, in the bloody Kentucky Territory, for all she cares. Wherever she wants to go. She is _Anna Strong:_ spy and signal; warrior and defender; scribe and sutler, killer and lover, liar and bearer of far too much agonizing truth, and the survivor of far, _far_ more than her neighbors anywhere shall ever understand. And she needs neither protection nor permission from any man.

 _But I miss him_ , whispers her memory, with a smile sad and sweet: an echo of Abigail from long ago.

Her heart aches whenever she thinks of Abigail, too. A softer, sweeter ache, for though she is selfish enough to miss her and Cicero, she knows, somehow, in her heart, that they have found their freedom and safety and peace. It eases her loneliness to imagine Abigail with her head upon Akinbode’s shoulder as the three of them laugh and sing together in a warm, sturdy house all their own. They deserve nothing less, and far more, after everything they suffered along the way.

And Anna? Long after her lodgers have retired to their bedrooms, she nurses a bottle of whiskey in the darkness of the common room. What does _she_ deserve?

 _What_ —and it is Selah’s voice she hears now: _What is important to her?_

“This country,” she whispers aloud to the crackling hearthfire. “The Ring. The cause.” But those are gone, all of them. Either accomplished, and thus in no more need of her, or disbanded since their purpose had been served. A gulp straight from the bottle burns her throat, but it only tightens the knot in her belly instead of loosening it as she’d hoped. Heartsore, Anna presses her face into her hands.

“The hope that … that despite all we suffered … that despite all we _did_ … that we only endured such terrible things because we had to defend the things that mattered most. Freedom. Goodness. Compassion. _Love._ So that something _worthy_ might survive the horror. So that we would know it was worth the cost.”

And suddenly, Anna knows what she must do.

And for once there need be no compromise—no sacrificing what her heart wants for the sake of what duty, propriety, or sheer cold pragmatism demands. Finally, at last, _want_ and _need_ are one and the same. Once, she had bloodied him, she’d inflicted the deepest and cruelest of wounds, because it was better that he suffer than that he perish outright. He, in turn, had nursed his wounds and armored them, because it was wiser to assume that any snake he encountered carried poison in its jaws than to dare trust that it might instead bear a healing leaf. They had both, in short, done what they'd needed to do.

But armor cannot protect a man already wounded. Armor merely holds the hurt in and gives the blood somewhere to pool. How long has he been bleeding into his cuirass? How much longer can he last? If he has any hope of ever truly living again, that armor must first come off.

So perhaps there is still something worth fighting for after all.

 

\---

 

“ _Land_ , one, two, three, and— _land_ , one, two— _easy_ now, girl. _Easy_ …”

Equally breathless, horse and rider fall from a canter into a brisk, high-stepping trot. Twice Hippolyta breaks stride halfway into a run again, her nostrils blowing and her head bobbing up and down, before Edmund manages to circle her down into a walk. Chuckling, he bows forward in the saddle and pats the mare on the side of her quivering neck.

“ _There’s_ a good girl. Almost got the trick of it now, haven’t we?”

Summer on Long Island—so much longer and lazier than the summers of his youth—and the very air seems to drip golden beneath the weight of the dazzling sun. Sweat drips down the line of his spine as well, and into the hollow of Hippolyta’s flanks.

She is a _fine_ creature, his Hippolyta: sweet and loyal, fleet-footed and fine-boned, nearly as tall as poor Bucephalus and with a striking dappled coat. But she is younger than Bucephalus had been, flightier and more fickle in her ways ... and suffice to say that the quality of training available in this country at present is not exactly the Spanish School. He has much yet to teach Her Majesty before her full potential can be reached.

Today’s lesson: jumping. A _perilous_ endeavor, to be certain. Enemies lurking behind every tree branch and hedge. This, at least, seems to be great-hearted Hippolyta’s opinion on the matter, as they’ve been at this for _months_ now and she still balks at obstacles that scarcely come up to her knees.

“But,” he murmurs, with a final pat to her neck, “you did very well today.” All the way to the farthest edges of the estate they’ve ranged, cajoling their way over pasture fences and nodding good-day to the tenants working their plots, and she’s only refused one jump. “I believe we’ve both earned our suppers tonight, have we not?”

Her ears swivel forward at the mention of food. Chuckling, he secures his hat more firmly and, with a click of his tongue, gives Hippolyta her head to gallop home.

 _This is freedom_ , thinks Edmund, with the wind whipping back his hair; _this_ is a liberation purer than any of the shallow, hypocritical ideology championed by the forefathers of his new home. Smooth and swift as the zephyrs blowing off the bay, Hippolyta flies onward, for Hippolyta _is_ the wind: she is fiercer than it and faster, and the rhythm of her hoofbeats upon the padded grass is as sweet as an aeolian harp. No harpsichord can compare to such music, he thinks, standing in his stirrups to feel the wind upon his face. No dancing partner could ever match her grace. _People_ will always disappoint, when it comes down to it; _people_ will lie and fail and betray. But horses … Between horse and rider, there is trust.

Even when the trail veers into the forest near Whitehall, where the trees drape leaf curtains over the path, he and Hippolyta weave through the trees as one. A bend up ahead, and he spies a leafy bough that must have fallen in the weekend’s storm. It lies all the way across the pathway, but it’s only a foot high or so—barely a hop for a horse of sixteen hands. Confident, Edmund gathers the reins in. He rests his crop at her withers and settles into a secure forward seat.

“Just like we’ve practiced, darling—steady now—and _one, two, thr_ —”

One stride before the tree branch, his calves squeeze, and Hippolyta gathers herself to leap. And then she confuses the direction entirely and hurls herself abruptly to the side, slamming Edmund unceremoniously into a low-hanging branch.

A flash of sky, blinding. A blur—a whipping sting across his face—and then a thud that knocks the breath from him and reverberates through every bone. Edmund gasps, stunned motionless. Even his ribcage struggles to remember how to breathe. His head his heavier than it has any right to be, and he only manages to lift it just in time to catch a final glimpse of silvery tail disappearing into the trees.

Closing his eyes, Edmund groans. His skull falls back to the earth. Sweet, loyal Hippolyta _indeed_.

Gathering the aching pieces of himself back into order is a young man’s game. Once, it had been as easy as the snapping of fingers: dust himself off, crick his back and swivel his neck a bit, and he’d be right as rain. Alas, Youth is an acquaintance buried long ago. Now, even once he manages to get his breath back, his muscles are already turning to stone; he has to lever himself into a sitting position one vertebra at a time. There’s a throb in his shoulder that promises a week’s soreness and another at his temple doubtless already laying a lovely goose’s egg. Not to mention the scrapes and splinters left along his cheek and jawbone by that lashing of twigs and leaves.

Yet it’s none of these that protests the loudest when he tries to stand again: it’s his damned silly _foot_. His ankle, to be precise. He has to drag the throbbing thing toward himself by the cuff of his boot, grimacing all the while.

“Oh, blast,” he mutters, wincing, as he prods the traitorous joint. Again he tries his weight on it, feeling like a particularly wobbly newborn foal, but only gets halfway upright before the pain persuades him to abort. Raking his hair away from his forehead, Edmund sighs, “Oh, hell.”

Two options, then. Each with its own pros and cons. One: he grits his teeth, retrieves his hat and riding crop from wherever they’ve been thrown, and reenacts his escape from Connecticut, hobbling the remaining mile or so to Whitehall just as he’d hobbled to freedom all those lonesome winters ago. Or, option two: he trusts Hippolyta to find her way home by herself and the stable hand, Mr. Preston, to have the good sense to send out a search party when he sees the filly standing there with reins hanging on the ground.

Both plans presume that he’s not found by less _friendly_ faces first. Such as wolves, say, or former Continentals aware of his past, or highwaymen out hunting for just such a rich and hapless gentleman as himself.

“Major! Major Hewlett! Answer me, for God’s sake!”

Edmund’s head jerks up; in horror, he breathes, “Oh, _damn_.”

On second thought—on second thought, actually, yes: a nice pair of highwaymen would be lovely right now. Highwaymen would be an _excellent_ surprise! His rings are worth a pretty penny, and Dick Turpin would be welcome to them, truly, Edmund wouldn’t mind at all. It would be a pittance of a price to pay, if only it meant that the person crashing through those trees down yonder could be _anyone_ other than _her_.

It’s another trap, he realizes, frantic. Not a pit this time to fall into, not those fathomless eyes luring him to his doom, but an active, intentional pursuit of him: a _hunt_. And she has him cornered as sure as a fox in its den. Lurching for the nearest sapling, Edmund hauls himself upright. Even the basest creature knows better than to show weakness to a predator, and _this_ is a huntress deadly indeed. The rustling of the leaves grows louder; the seagull piping of her voice calling out for him cuts through the forest, and he catches a glimpse of gown between the trees.

“ _Major!”_ she cries again, so anguished he’s almost fool enough to believe it’s real. Suddenly, the sound reminds him so painfully of that final scream he’d heard echoing from Whitehall as the rebels dragged him away in the dead of night that he staggers from the force of the memory. His footing falters, he loses his grip on the tree, and Edmund feels his ankle giving out again just as Mrs. Strong bursts through the trees.

Edmund’s arse hits the earth. Stumbling under her own momentum, Mrs. Strong catches herself against a tree trunk and staggers to a halt three feet away. Her chest is heaving, her hair escaping in all directions; her hands on the tree are like claws. And, panting, she stares down at him with eyes so wild and cheeks so flushed that he feels himself flushing as well, hot with embarrassment and anger and pain, and, far too loudly, snaps, “Madam, I am not a _fox!”_

Mrs. Strong blinks.

“I’ll … make a note of it, sir.”

“What I mean to say is—I do _not_ appreciate being _hunted_ , Mrs. Strong. Pursued through the forest on my own estate as though I am some quarry to be captured or—or some hound to be called to heel!” Still sitting flat in the leaf litter, Edmund gestures forcefully at the surrounding trees. “Is it so much to ask, that a man might commune with nature in peace?”

It is a remarkable thing, the series of changes that flick across her face in the space of a second flat. Jaw dropping open, then closed, mouth flat, eyes from eggs to narrow slits—and at the end of it, the hand on the tree trunk snarls into a fist.

“I saw your _horse_ —” Leaning forward, she jabs a finger back toward the way she came. “—galloping for Whitehall with nothing in its saddle but _air_. Forgive me a measure of concern!” Mrs. Strong rocks back on her heels, and her hands, with the remarkable lines of her wrists, push the hair back from her face. In that gesture, in the furrow of her brow, he is ashamed to see disgust—not with him, but with herself. “But seeing as you have the matter so well in hand…”

“Ah—Mrs … Mrs. Strong. Please, a moment, wait.”

She looks back at him over her shoulder, wary. He does not want, but cannot repress, a surge of shame. “Forgive me; it’s … been a trying day. But my absence has been noted by now, I’m certain; no doubt Hippolyta is at this very moment pestering the hostler for her oats. So if I could simply trouble you to return to Whitehall and direct Mr. Preston as to my whereabouts, I would be greatly in your debt.”

A sigh, and once again, she turns. “Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t leave you like this.” Alarm sparks in him as she reaches out. “Here, allow me to—”

He cannot help it; he does not even realize he’s doing it until it’s none. Nonetheless: Edmund recoils from her hand.

Mrs. Strong, too, flinches, hand freezing in the air. When, after a heavy moment, she speaks again, she cannot meet his eyes.

“What more could I possibly do, major, to hurt you now.”

It is that softness, the baring of their mutual scar, that persuades him to allow her to kneel in the loam beside him and take his foot into her lap. Gently, she draws his boot off; carefully, she palpates his swollen ankle over his stocking and pronounces it not broken, merely sprained. The caress of her palm is more perilous than anything he faced in the war. Always there is the danger that she’ll look up suddenly and her eyes will meet his own; or perhaps her hand will stray too far up his calf and brush the skin where his breeches have ridden up over the knee. His heel rests in the hollow of her thighs.

Once upon a time, he had dreamt of scenarios like this. He had imagined her looking up at him with eyes a-dazzle and mischief on her lips as she knelt to peel his boots off … Unwinding the sash from around his waist … Sliding her hands up the legs of his breeches to unbuckle his baldric and belt. He had awoken the morning of their wedding bizarrely anxious about her _bodice_ , of all things, all those tiny cloth-covered buttons on the front of her gown—and the mess his trembling hands would surely make of them before her own fingers, so much more slender and quick, opened herself up to him one eyelet at a time. Oh, yes: Edmund has dreamt, he will admit it, about that warm and welcoming hollow of her thighs.

The reality is more akin to stepping on a bear trap and waiting for the snap.

“What business brought you near Whitehall in the first place?” he murmurs as she wraps his neckcloth, commandeered for the purpose, into a makeshift brace around ankle and heel. He half fears the answer—but the dance of her hands, weaving round and round with such slow steady grace, is mesmerizing. “If I may ask.”

“Oh. Well.” Is that embarrassment he hears? Surely not; surely the reason her eyes remain lowered is simply because she must mind the work of her hands. “To tell you truly, I had come looking for you.”

He chews on his lip. “Oh?”

“Yes. To prove you wrong.”

A furrow of his brow, but even as she looks up at him, she does not explain. Simply draws a deep breath, and, after a moment’s hesitation, ventures, “May I show you something, major? After we’ve retrieved your horse? It won’t take long, I promise, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

“What manner of _something_?”

“Words wouldn't do it justice. But I think once you’ve seen it, you’ll understand.”

Perhaps it is the cloth around his ankle that ensnares him. Perhaps it is the plea in her eyes. With a fearful resignation born of knowing he’s already doomed, Edmund assents.

 

\---

 

“My mother used to bring me here, when I was little. I was young, so terribly young, when she passed away, but all my life I’ve still come here whenever I needed her most.”

The sun nods low toward the horizon. With his arm around her shoulders and hers around his waist, Anna leads him down to the beach. He’s had his ankle seen to since she helped him hobble his way back to Whitehall, supporting him just like this the whole way; the cravat has been exchanged for a proper bandage and splint, and she suspects he could manage well enough on his own by now if she were to step aside. But nothing will deprive her of the opportunity to brace her hand featherlight over his heart. The prominence of his ribs through his waistcoat worries her, and they both must keep their eyes set forward lest they risk brushing cheeks.

It is a fiction, the pretense that there is any proper distance between them. Perhaps it is fiction that there is still anything between them—be it obstacle or bond—at all. But for the space of this sunset, at least, they both seem content to pretend.

“Here, sit.” Reluctantly, she helps lower him onto a driftwood log, then takes her seat an arm’s length away. Behind them, the horses have set peacefully to cropping the tall dune grass; before them, the ocean gleams golden and red. Hewlett turns to her, a question poised on his lips, but Anna holds a finger up to her own and nods out toward the bay.

They’re just in time. Not for the sunset, but for the tide.

Away from the shore, the water ebbs, and slips through the caves and arches of the cliffsides that fly their buttresses out in a horseshoe around the strip of sand where they sit. It stirs in those hidden caverns where man can never tread, and softly, gradually, the singing starts.

If she lets him, Hewlett will devise an explanation, she’s sure. Something about the physics of water and the shape of the caves that turns the cliffside and the currents into one vast musical instrument played by God’s own hand. When she glances at him, however, his attention is rapt. The sound swells to envelope them in harmonies as loose and lush as the calling of whales, and throughout it all, there is sunset in his irises and a yearning to understand in his face.

The sun slips lower. The waterline recedes, and as the last note fades, Anna realizes she’s been holding her breath. Blinking breaks the tears built up on her eyelids and sends them streaming down her cheeks, so that she has to look away from him while she collects her breath.

“I know she’s gone,” she manages at last, voice thick. The heel of her hand wipes at her cheeks. “I know it’s not her. But she used to sing to me every night before bedtime—she was always singing, even simply walking around the house, she was always—and—and when I come here, as we used to, together … When I hear the tides sing … For a few moments, at least, I feel as though she’s with me again.”

With a final sniff, Anna stands. He is looking up at her with fear and worry and wonder in his face, and he does not flinch as she takes his hands in hers. “You’re right. Life is full of disappointment and tragedy and pain, and sometimes it seems there’s no sense to any of it. But there is so much beauty as well, major! If only you will let yourself see!”

Dropping to her knees in the sand, she squeezes his fingers till their bones grind together and gazes beseechingly into his wide, dark, frightened eyes. “I know that I have hurt you, deeply. I know there is no undoing what is done. But it—it breaks my heart—it breaks it to the very core of me—to hear you say such things about the world being such a dim and terrible place. That is not the world I fought for. It is not the world _you_ fought for. And if only you would open your eyes, and your heart, for a moment, I know you’ll see you had the right of it all along. There _is_ meaning in our lives. Not divine or inherent, perhaps, but meaning nonetheless.” And she smiles, despite it all. “The secret is simply that it is ours to define.”

The wonder is gone from him. The worry, too, has melted away, and all that remains in his eyes is the fear. His jaw, set flat and hard, works for a moment; his brow furrows and his eyes narrow and rapidly blink. Until at last, he all but whispers, “Why are you doing this?”

“What?”

“Have you not tormented me enough?”

“Major, I don’t—”

“Why can you not simply permit me to move on!”

And he snatches his hands from hers.

“Major! Tormenting you is _not_ my intent!” Stricken, Anna reaches for him, but he turns his shoulder like a shield. She’s left with her hands perched awkwardly on his knees. “I ask nothing of you! I want … nothing of you that you do not freely give. But I would be your friend, if you would let me. And I would see you smile again. The way you did once.” Still he will not look at her, so she tries a different tack. “After the harm I have done you, surely it is my duty to help you now?”

“Duty.” The laugh Hewlett huffs is soft, but his lips and voice alike are flat. “Yes. We have both always done our duty, haven’t we. No matter how odious the task.”

Stiffly, he stands, such that she has to fall back onto her hindquarters to make room. She catches herself with a hand and feels a splinter of seashell digging into her palm.

“Well, madam, allow me to set your conscience at ease. I assure you, never have I been happier or more whole. And I would thank you to cease trying to convince me of my unhappiness simply because you cannot bear your own.”

“ _Mine?”_

This time, his laugh is bitter outright.

“What, you—you cannot tolerate your husband any longer, but nor can you tolerate the solitude, and so you suppose that I would be easy prey? Or am I merely penance—a way to assuage your guilt? Well, I am very sorry that life has not met your expectations, madam. But I urge you to make your peace with it, as I have with mine.”

She was right: he can walk quite well without her. He limps, yes—his boot drags in the sand—but he strikes off toward the horses with shoulders squared and head high. The sight of him walking away from her as he had in that coffeehouse long ago pierces Anna to the core. Her fists clench in the sand, and she’s shouting even before she feels the shell slicing her palm.

“Have it your way, then! Go on! Back to your telescopes and your books! I pray they make you happy someday, I truly do!” Her palm is wet, and so are her cheeks, her tears stinging the corners of her mouth with salt. “But how dare you look me in the eye, after everything, and claim that none of it left any mark on you!”

“How dare _I?"_ he snarls, whipping to face her with hackles up and teeth bared. “How dare _you!_ After everything indeed, madam! All the damage you inflicted on me, the betrayal, the heartbreak, the _disgrace_ , and still, all I asked of you was the truth of your feelings for me. Well, madam, you made your answer quite plain. So how _dare_ you pretend my happiness is any business of yours now.” He moves toward her, an ungainly, stumbling step. In another man, it might have seemed threatening, but even in the last half-light of sunset she can see the grief on his face. “Does it make _you_ happy, I wonder? This land you fought so hard for, your precious _America?_ After all the shames and sacrifices duty demanded of you, is it everything you ever dreamed?”

“What does it matter! I would have given up all of it for you!”

Hewlett’s jaw snaps shut. He blinks at her, but Anna cannot stop the words from tumbling out any more than she can stop her sobs.

“I betrayed my country for you! My oldest friend, for you. I would have left—my home, my friends, my family—I would have lived under the king I’d fought so hard to free myself from, simply to keep you safe. Did all that mean nothing to you? Were my sacrifices that not enough? I would have _wed_ you, Edmund. I meant that. I would have lived the rest of my days beside you, on this or any other shore.”

Arms crossed over her belly, Anna bends nearly double, tears falling on the sand. “All that, and you asked if I _loved_ you? How could you believe even for a moment that I did not!”

Night falls upon them. Already, the wind feels colder; already, the air has lost its soft, dripping heat and become taut, fragile, strained. She is terrified to look up lest she discover that he isn’t even there.

When she does lift her head, the blankness of his expression is even worse.

Flushed, humiliated, Anna staggers to her feet.

“…Mrs. Strong. Madam—madam, wait.” When she stumbles, he reaches for her, but she stops him with an upraised hand. To look at him, to see whether his face reflects that panic beginning to bubble up through his words, is too much to bear. “ _Anna_ —”

“ _Don’t,_ ” she whispers, soft but forceful. “Don’t pretend you have the right.”

Whether he tries to follow her, she never knows. Looking back is a trap that Anna will not let fool her again. All she can do is walk away from him, step by stumbling step, with her hand pressed over her stomach as though he’s gutted her, one cruel slash from hip to hip, and if she lets her guard down even for a moment, all her blood and her organs and the pain that makes her heart feel ground to pulp will come spilling out onto her feet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...So the reunion's going well, I think!
> 
> Just like in [Law & Order & Authori[tea]](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4504110/chapters/10241874), I've managed yet again to cram two of my favorite things into my fic: folklore and falling off horses! Well, write what you know, they say. The fairy tale De Jong references — "lovers and betrayal and ships" — is, of course, The Three Snake-Leaves, which I think bears some relevance to Anna and Edmund's relationship even though I _very_ much hope that they find a happier ending than the prince and princess do. I actually wanted to work in the legend of Saeftinghe also, as its themes of greed and hubris are quite fitting for De Jong himself, but alas ... best to stick with one folkoric conceit at a time.
> 
> One more chapter. The rating will be going up. Thanks for reading, love to hear from ya, see you soon!


	3. Compass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the wake of their quarrel on the beach, Ann and Edmund take action in different ways.

\--- 1778 ---

 

“Ah, very impressive, my dear! That would be Pixis, I believe— _Pixis Nautica_ , sometimes called _la Boussole_. The mariner’s compass.”

Crouching to bring his eye level with the scope, Edmund angles it, ever so delicately, just a hair more to the right. There is something about his hands that compels her eyes to follow; something about his wrists, his fingers, square but long and adroit, that wraps itself around the thread coiled low in Anna's belly and slowly spools her out. The way he grins, unselfconscious and broad, when he finds his target makes that thread wobble and twist.

“See—it sits upon the mast of the Argo, with its needle, that star just _there_ , pointing north. Guiding Jason and his Argonauts past the dreaded Hydra on their quest for the Golden Fleece.” Anna’s turn to stoop now, eye at the glass. Viewed like this, the sky seems not black, but rose and violet, spattered and marbled with layers of luminosity impossibly deep. Against such a glowing banner, the constellation in question seems, well … a bit lackluster. Nothing more than a cluster of pinpricks, distant and dim. No wonder Jason had a hard time getting at that fleece. “You have a keen eye to spot it; the light is typically very faint. It was only some twenty-five years ago that the constellation was even first classified, compliments of Monsieur de Lacaille.”

“Is that so? Well, my condolences to Monsieur de la So-and-So, major, but I’ve some terrible news. We here on Long Island have been counting that among our constellations for as long as anyone can remember. Only, we always called it the Wheel.”

“Oh, dear dear _dear_ —a dark day for Nicolas-Louis, I am sure. Or it would be, were he not already, well…”

“…Among the heavens himself?”

“Alas. But when I join him there someday, I shall be sure to let him know.”

His tone is light, but his words twist in her belly—this time not with allure, but deep fear. Wondering whether he’d speak so lightly of death if he knew how closely it stalked him, Anna swallows hard. As he calibrates the scope without a care, she lifts her gaze to the skies.

“As children, we would lie out on the cliffs by the bay on fair nights and compete to see who could find the most shapes in the stars. We didn’t know their names, of course—not the proper ones—and probably the constellations we discovered wouldn’t match those printed on any charts. But we found our own pictures. Devised our own names. It seemed good enough.”

Still fiddling, Edmund hums.

“I’ve often wondered how many different names the same stars have had over the course of history, and how many have been forgotten with the collapse of civilizations and the vanishment of tribes. How many charts drawn in distant lands have been lost to us? How much knowledge was never even written down? Is it not remarkable, Anna, how mankind may be presented with precisely the same set of information and yet come to conclusions beyond counting of what it all means?” With softness in his eyes and smile alike, he straightens, captures her gaze. “It is an essential motivation of the human condition, I believe. That search for meaning. Always questing back toward the divine.”

These are the games they play, she and Edmund. Strange intellectual puzzles so very unlike the games she played with past suitors, which more often involved hands than minds. It’s like being in a lecture hall, almost … yet the make her smile. “But if no one can agree on the meaning—well, Edmund, what does that say about the nature of God? About his very existence? For if the true meaning is ordained divinely, as it must be, then surely the false prophets would all be proven wrong eventually and the truth of the matter made clear. Would life not be much more just and _orderly_ if He had been courteous enough to make the true names of things clear?”

“Ah, well, certainly it would be reassuring to know the answers for certain. And yet…”

Somehow they’ve moved closer now. Somehow, upon the base of the scope, their fingers brush.

“...And yet, is it not more important simply that we ask?”

 

\--- 1782 ---

 

 _I killed him_ , thinks Anna, and there is almost as much liberation in the epiphany as there is pain.

The stars are out. In the time it takes her to stumble from the beach back to Setauket, night has overtaken the town entirely, and she must trust her feet and their long acquaintance with this landscape to get her home. Even if it were daylight, her eyes are a bit too busy blinking back tears. Hand still pressed to her belly, she lifts her blurry gaze to the sky and follows a faint wheel of stars northward till it fades into Strong Manor’s golden glow.

“Mistress Anna?” squeaks Esther, her new barmaid, when Anna staggers through the door. A tiny girl, with a tiny voice—one that by rights should be swallowed beneath the roar of any tavern at night, the joy, the voices, the violin—and yet that little pebble of a question plunks heavy into the room. The voices fall silent, and even Mr. Robinson at his fiddle stutters to a tremulous halt.

 _What happened?_ she hears one voice say, and _Who did this?_ asks another, amidst gasps. Only then does Anna consider how she must look. Hair a ruin, skirt matted with wet sand at the knees and hem, her nose red and her cheeks tear-streaked and the whole of her hot, blotchy, swollen face contorted in pain. When she tries to unclench her fist over her stomach, her palm pulls painfully, the skin stiff with salt and dried blood.

_He placed the most beautiful pieces of his heart in my hand, and I crushed them to pulp._

“Out,” says a voice, distantly. Her own voice, she realizes, but as though from another room. And perhaps she only ever said it in her head, to be honest, because nobody moves. “Out! Everybody out, we’re closed!”

The night shatters with a sudden clatter of stumbling footsteps and scraping chairs. Her neighbors are still gathering their belongings, some sending her concerned glances and some full of scorn, as she pushes through the mob toward the stairs.

_And the man I befriended—_

“Mistress Anna, are you—?”

_The man I admired—_

“You too, Esther,” she murmurs, hand clenched on the banister, though her tone has lost its bite.

_The man I was so afraid to love—_

In the safety of her bedroom, she locks the door behind herself, hands shaking; presses her back to the wood; draws a breath—

_Died that night in Rivington’s because I did not have the courage to speak._

Anna sinks to the floor.

It’s not a voluntary action. There’s nothing she wants on the floor, and in fact, she’s gone down in such a way that the hard wood is prodding most unforgivingly at her ankles and knees. Her legs have simply decided that they don’t want to be legs anymore, and honestly, the rest of her has to agree. She doesn’t want to have a belly anymore, not when sorrow makes it twist like this. She doesn’t want to have a heart. More than anything, she very much does not want to have a mind, or any organ that can whisper to her that in trying to save a good man, she killed the very parts of him that she had wanted most to save, and that that thing hermiting himself in Whitehall these days is nothing more than his ghost.

And ghosts cannot be healed. Only exorcised, that they might trouble the living no more.

It is all so clear to her now. The reason for her stupid, senseless persistence; the reason she could never keep her eyes from seeking him out. Here, in the blue-black darkness of her room, she sees what all those sunlit glimpses of him in the market had left her blind to. She can gild her ambitions in altruism all she likes, but he was _right_ , damn him: it was never truly about healing _him_. All this time spent convincing herself _he_ was unhappy, _he_ still needed her, _he_ was so broken and hurt, when the ugly truth has always been that it was her. _She_ was unhappy. _She_ still needed him. So preoccupied with trying to tear open his long-healed scars that she never paused to look down and see that her own spirit was bloodied and bruised.

It always comes to this, in the end. Once, she loved a boy bright as summer with mischief in his lips, and together they painted such portraits of their future together as would make Reynolds himself weep. And then with no warning whatsoever he walked off the edge of their canvas and left her trapped within the frame. She’d watched every brushstroke as he built his new life, and even though she knew she could never become part of it, she’d clung to every crumb he deigned to throw her way.

Eventually, she began work on her own opus, half-heartedly—or at least held still while another man, stable and serious, modelled a landscape around them both. He prized her without understanding her, he brought her peace and comfort but scarce joy, he wound his name around her neck like a velvet tether and trusted her to follow at his heels. And then he, too, was gone—not of his will, perhaps, but to grander things, ultimately, to success and prestige as he never before had known—and she found herself alone again in a life only half sketched.

Round and round, the wheel turns, and always back to the same spot. Anna, alone, rotting away in Setauket, with her hands and heart hobbled because she cannot bring herself to move on from the men who have moved on from her.

So. Where does the wheel go now.

On and on, as it always does, in the same old rut? Another day, another week, another decade. Stay in her circuit and watch Setauket circle around her in its slow but steady way. Pour her life and her heart and the sweat of her brow into this tavern; make it her joy and her pride. And she _could_. If she can take a harmless black petticoat and make it into a weapon powerful enough to bring down an empire, God knows she can build Strong Manor into the finest, the warmest and most welcoming and most profitable tavern Setauket has ever seen, a firm foundation for her repaired reputation and her life. She can watch her hair go gray at the temples while Mary Woodhull’s belly swells again; she can refit the furnishings and import expensive French wines while little Sprout grows tall. She can put Whitehall out of her mind forever and never again lift her gaze to the stars.

But always while glancing over her shoulder every time the door opens, waiting for the day Selah returns to take it all away.

 _I have wasted too much time_ , thinks Anna numbly, shipwrecked on the hardwood with the taste of tears on her lips, _living other people’s lives in place of my own_.

Her cheeks have dried now. Her heart feels hollow, and yet lighter, somehow—freed from something that she dearly loved yet which was dragging her to the ocean floor. Resolution comes with a strength and an anger and a restless impulse to _run_ , to _move_ , to revel in the strength of her body, to celebrate her remaining youth, to waste no more time sitting and weeping and tearing herself apart when she could be building instead.

She bullies her rebellious legs into submission; staggers to the basin by the window; fills it from the pitcher and leans deep to cup handfuls to her face. Water runs down her nose into her philtrum, down her lips into the hollow of her throat, down her neck into the gap between breasts and busk, making her shiver with the cold. In this way, she washes herself clean of the last tears she will ever shed for Edmund Hewlett. Hewlett, or Woodhull, or any other man who can no longer spare tears for her.

Then she lights the candle in the window, lifts the lid on the traveling trunk at the foot of her bed, and begins packing her things.

 

\---

 

 _Love_.

Four letters. One syllable. A trip of the tongue and a gentle glide to a halt. Staggering, how such a small word could knock the stars from the sky.

Now the heavens hang stricken on their axis, tilted and senseless and lost, as Edmund paces a furrow into the hardwood of his expensive sitting-room floor. All is blue with midnight. All the household is sleeping, as he should be as well, not haunting the hallways in his shirtsleeves with his collar open and his breeches still splattered with leaves and sand. Every other step sends a shock through his ankle. Every twinge is a reminder of her hands. And with every beat of his restless boustrophedon, that terrible night in Rivington’s replays in his head.

_She said no. Didn’t she? Did she not?_

_Did she say anything?_

_Did I merely assume?_

His feet stumble to a halt at the harpsichord; his hands grip the books stacked on the fallboard as though he’ll drown if they do not. He drowns in memory of their conversation on the beach. _Oh God—oh, God, I was so cruel._

It’s incredible, actually. As a young man at university, when he had felt so learned and so wise, he had curled his lip at the medical courses—and at the cadavers that his classmates in that department smuggled into the school. _His_ interests did not deal in such base matter; _his_ mind was meant for mysteries of a higher sort. The divine, not the mortal, had always been Edmund’s guiding light. Yet suddenly he understands precisely how those corpses must have felt when they were stolen from their slumber and cut open before a dissection theatre of eager eyes. For Edmund, too, has been sleeping—sleeping for far too long—and suddenly his heart is there bleeding upon the harpsichord, and his very _soul_ has been slit open, picked to pieces, exposed.

No more denial. No more pretending that he does not still dream of her at that harpsichord at night. And as sentiments long buried come clawing up out of the earth, Edmund is, he realizes, _furious_.

With her. With himself. With the war. With the years wasted, the nights spent sleepless, the secrets, the misery, the tears. With her for not speaking plainly and with himself for not reading between the lines. So furious he trembles with it; so furious that his breath shudders and his hand clenches hard upon the books. What in God’s name is _wrong_ with them? Why have they both insisted on being so damnably _selfless_ all this time? Oh, how _noble_ they have been, the both of them, what _martyrs_ , sacrificing themselves upon the altar of what they each _thought_ the other needed and yet never bothering to _ask_. All that, when it would have been so much wiser simply to reach out to one another and whisper, _I want_.

 _Don’t_ , warns a voice, compellingly rational. _You are happy. You are healthy. You are whole. What are you thinking, ripping out sutures when the wound’s only just healed?_

 _You have Hippolyta_ , cajoles another, sympathetic and sweet. _You have Andromeda, Chaucer, Plato, la Boussole. That is what you need right now. An hour or so at the telescope to settle your mind, and then off to a good night’s sleep._

But there is a third voice also, and it is mocking and cold:

_Twice she’s sought you out, you bloody idiot. And twice you’ve turned her away. Have you not kept the lady waiting long enough._

Edmund knocks the stack of books clear over as he leaves the room, such a rush is he in. Volumes fall from harpsichord to hardwood with a thud. He does not pause to pick them up.

He does not bother retrieving his waistcoat, either, or tying his neckcloth, or donning either jacket or hat. Even in the stables—where the horses, startled awake by the slam of the door, jerk their heads up and stare at him, scandalized by his _dishabille_ —he forgoes saddling up entirely, asking no more of Hippolyta than that she take the bit into her mouth. Then he hauls himself up bareback with a handful of mane and urges her at a canter into the night.

All the stars out of order … Yet one, he finds, is still true. It catches his eye on the way into town, a soft and distant light. He follows the needle of the mariner’s compass till he arrives at a house where all the windows are dark—save one.

There on the upper story, candlelight pulses gentle and golden like the ebbing of the tide. He reins Hippolyta to a halt, prancing, jarred by the surreal sensation of having lived this precise moment before. _I was afraid it would be too late_ , he recalls suddenly—a more innocent man’s voice, in a more innocent time. _But then I saw your light_.

And then as he watches, beyond the sheer curtains drifting in and out of view, a shadow at the edge of the frame:

Anna Strong steps into the light.

 

\---

 

She is standing with her back to her window, removing the last pin from her hair, when suddenly Anna shivers with the sensation of being watched.

Her hair tumbles to her shoulders, a heavy fall. All around her lies the wreckage of her life here: jewelry and garments, books and keepsakes, treasures and trinkets alike strewn across floor and bed and, of course, in her travelling trunk. It’s embarrassing to say, but there is not … admittedly … as much as she had supposed. If she presses, she could have her entire life in that trunk by morning and put Setauket behind her forever by noon.

She can make a new life elsewhere, as she’s daydreamed of—partner up with Townsend in York City, open a tea house in Boston, buy land in the Kentucky Territory and carve out a homestead on the frontier’s edge. Maybe she’ll find glory out there. Maybe she’ll fail. But at least it will be a failure she chose. And Setauket will have not even a single hairpin left to show that she had ever been there at all.

But the fury, the restless energy of resolution, has smoldered down to ashes, and with the embers fast cooling, only the emptiness remains. Her bones ache; her mind feels unraveled at the seams. Hence why she’s just begun taking her hair down for bed when that prickling awareness creeps over her nape.

Anna stills. It’s not an … _unpleasant_ sensation, this; not like Simcoe used to give her, when used to feel his eyes roaming over her from across the common room or hear his footsteps outside her door at night. This sensation is strange and liquid and exhilarating, shivering along her spine before settling in her belly with an aching low and hot. _It’s nothing_ , she tells herself, and turns to the window to prove it. All that looks back at her is her own face, her reflection solidified by the light. _There’s no one there_. Yet she can’t shake it. It’s the same sensation that sent her hand sliding down to the crux of her thighs that night she first wondered whether Hewlett, too, and been watching her, and it’s wound itself around that old thread in her belly that she’s left coiled too long. Nor can she shake the certainty that if she blows out the candle and looks again, she’ll see a white horse and rider looking up at her from below.

 _He came to me like that. Once._ Hardly knowing what’s come over her, Anna turns her back to the window again. Her hands slide to the front of her gown. _He knocked on my door in the middle of the night and offered to be my friend_ . As she draws the first pin out from her stomacher, she doesn’t dare examine why she’s doing it—but nor does she dare stop.

Pin by pin, her gown opens, and slowly she lets the jacket slide down her arms. Can he see that? Can he see the baring of her shoulders, of flesh exposed by fabric inch by inch? Can he tell, from so far below, how sheer her shift is—so sheer that she shivers as she air hits her skin. Yet despite the chill, there is a warmth seeping through her from the inside out. Anna doesn’t even realize she’s been holding her breath till her gown hits the floor.

 _How surreal he seemed in my doorway that night, this stranger, this enemy, this odd and awkward man—blinking on the threshold as though he were as surprised to find himself there as I_ .

It’s a simple game, this. Not one she’s played before, but it’s not as though there are complicated rules. Simply divest herself of her clothing piece by piece, as languidly and conspicuously as possible, even as her trembling hands yearn to rush.

Draw the ribbons of her waistband out long and wide, let the knots slip lazy and loose. Her skirts slide down her hips in their own time, drawing the eye to every swell and curve. She pulls her hand over one shoulder before reaching back one-handed and pulling loose the lacing of her stays. Each eyelet is a separate effort, a serpentine slowly separating up her spine. Always she keeps her back to the window. Always she exaggerates each motion, growing warmer and warmer as she imagines what she must look like to him, and what he must look like watching her. By the time she pulls the lacing out entirely, she’s burning from nape to knee, and it’s no longer possible to resist turning around.

The stays, butterflied, fall to her feet. Her shift is all that remains to her, and the cotton is so thin that she can see the red blush of her nipples right through it when she glances down. In the window, all the peaks and shadows of her bosom reflect in the glass. The thought of pulling the shift over her head and showing herself plain makes her belly jump with fear and delight all at once, so deliciously _naughty_ a thought it is, so wild and sinful and so very much like the reckless, half-feral child she was once. Knowing how sweetly naïve he can be about women, it might even be wise to really drive the point home. But the worry that she’s actually been performing to no audience—or, God forbid, the _wrong_ audience—leaves her wavering. She’s still hesitating with her fingertips at her neckline and her lip between her teeth when she hears three sharp knocks from below.

Anna draws a shuddering breath. She throws a shawl around her shoulders and wraps it around her breasts before rushing downstairs, where she fumbles the locks open without even calling to ask who’s there. Then suddenly there is nothing between them but the shock of it all, and he’s standing in her doorway looking as surreal as he had that first time, plus twice as flustered and as scared.

For a moment, neither speak.

He’s in almost as scandalous a state as she. Laces open past his collarbone, shirttails stuffed unevenly into his breeches, hair a loose-bound tumult, as though he’s just moments ago tumbled out of bed. The thought of Major Edmund Hewlett, with all his dignity and poise, galloping through town at midnight like that for her—for _her!_ —makes her breath shudder and her grip loosen on the shawl.

“Forgive me. For my behavior on the beach today, and for … so much else.” What else, he doesn’t specify. The words clunk into the silence simply for the purpose, she supposes, of breaking it. Neither of them know what to do with it now, though, and it’s moments further before he rushes on: “What you said earlier—do you still—?”

“Yes.” No specification necessary. And for once, no hesitation. Not this time. “Do you? Still?”

“ _Always_. For who you are. And all that you are. As I said.”

And that is all it takes.

That thread between them is taut now, so tight and short that it trembles with every breath. When she steps backward, it pulls him along after, the door swinging shut in his wake. The glass is gone. Now there is nowhere but his feet to stand but alongside hers, his booted and hers bare. Nowhere for her hands to rest but the smooth skin bared along his collarbone. Nowhere to look but each other’s eyes. His hands find her waist, and they take another step backward, hesitate, sway. The last few inches are halting—bashful, even; their noses bump on the way.

But the kiss is steady and sure.

Anna’s shawl falls. It’s tangled underfoot within moments, making them trip and stumble against one another as they clutch at shoulders and hips and necks. She thrusts her chest against his, mouth working open and wet; his back thuds into the door. Within instants, he’s spun her around and returned the favor, pinning her with one of his legs between hers. When he cups her jaw, however, his touch his featherlight. Raw-boned and rein-roughed, his hands, so large and compelling, cradle her cheeks with the same care they once did a telescope as she searches her face for several moments with eyes starstruck and dark before leaning in and shoving his mouth to hers—hard, passionate, with abandon, the fronts of their teeth clicking as their lips are forced apart.

There was a time she would never have believed Major Hewlett, of all people, capable of the ardor with which he sucks at her tongue now, nor the hunger which his hands roam over her hipbones, rucking the skirt of her shift in their wake. Then again, there was a time she’d never have imagined herself tangling her fingers in his hair, either, or squeezing her thighs tight around the leg he’s wedged between hers. But if she’s learned one thing in this war, it’s that a good tactician knows how to retaliate against even the most unexpected assault. So she claims his mouth just as fiercely, her teeth catching his lower lip, and when his hand settles under the bottom of her ribcage, she drags it up to her breast.

That lip catches on her incisor as he pulls backward, drawing a ragged gasp. In the darkness, she can just make out a thin line of blood. Then he’s grinding their foreheads together, his teeth bared and his eyes screwed shut. So soft she can scarcely hear him, though she feels his lips moving against hers, he breathes, “I _want_ —“

Layers beyond counting in that hesitation: some desires she already knows of, others she could spend a lifetime uncovering piece by piece. But she has desires of her own, does Anna, not all of which can comfortably wait. Start with the simplest, then. The one she’s certain they share. With her nerves buzzing and her blood burning hot, she leads him by the hand toward the stairs.

The first thing Anna does in her bedroom is hesitate in the doorway, flushing as she remember what a disaster she’s made of the room. Edmund pauses in the threshold, blinking at the mess, but doesn’t ask. The second thing is cross to the window and blow out the light.

“Lest we put on a show,” she teases, surprised to hear such shakiness in her own voice, which earns a nervous chuckle from the shadows where Edmund stands. Feeling strangely shy, Anna leans over the table to move the candle away from the sill. She’s still bent over at the waist when she hears his footsteps approach.

Breath, warm and sinuous, ghosting along her shoulder at the base of her neck. Then a brush of lips at her neck so featherlight she’d be tempted to believe she imagined it if she couldn’t see his reflection bending over hers. His ghost, so faint and hazy in the glass, trails its face along her shoulder, such that she has the sensation of experiencing two different existences simultaneously: one in which she feels his mouth and its steadily firmer touch, another in which they are nothing more than overlapping transparencies of shadow and light. By the time his lips suck at her pulse, then, and his tongue smooths over the hollow beneath her ear, his arms are around her waist, and Anna melts into his hold. Wantonly, she arches backward, eager to feel his erection rocking against her buttocks or his hand slipping inside her shift.

Neither comes. His kisses trail off into a simple, steady press, and for several long moments, he simply holds her there, his hands at her ribcage and his lips slightly parted against her neck. So long does it go on, in fact, that worry overtakes arousal, making her pull away and turn.

The look on his face, half in shadow, breaks her heart.

Wrapping her arms around his shoulders, she buries his face in the crook of his neck and murmurs that she knows, she knows. And there in front of the window, they hold one another, whispering confessions almost too fragile to voice, with their breasts pressed heart to heart.

Heart to heart they lay together, later, when their spirits have grown bolder again and their hands returned to roaming over and under clothes. Heart to heart, their tongues slide over one another, licking and sucking, her hand down the back of his trousers urging him onward as he rocks between her thighs—her back arching, throat whimpering, his cock dragging his breeches back and forth along her slit. The wool soft and rough and oh, God, _perfect_ , thrilling, her senses so heightened now that even the fine weave of her chemise feels _unbearable_ on nipples so stiff, and she wiggles one hand between them to fumble the falls of his breeches undone. His own fingers sneak up the inside of her thigh. Anna gasps, startles—then, muscles relaxing, sinks into the rocking of his palm. Far beyond hope of coordination, she gives up on his buttons for the moment and focuses on letting her hips push and pull.

The disappointment when he takes his hand away is tempered, somewhat, by the privilege of getting to feel exactly how wet those fingers are while he drags her shift off over her head. It’s a favor she has some difficulty returning with regards to his shirt, given his newfound preoccupation with exploring every inch of her torso with his mouth.

“I am _trying_ to be scientific about this!” he exclaims, indignant, when she protests between gasps of laughter that his stubble is tickling her skin. “How am I meant to make a study of you if you will not cease _squirming_ long enough for me to accomplish any exploration at all!”

He tries to catch her wrists, then, and pin her arms to the headboard with one hand, Anna levers herself upright. He sinks onto his back without resistance at the press of her hand to his chest. “Allow me to instruct,” she pants, her smile wicked, and follows him down.

Brutal, her assault on his throat and collarbone. Absolutely unforgiving. He arches beneath her, groaning long and low, as her lips and teeth leave a trail of whimpers and red spots that he’ll be wearing around town for days. But each love-bite is soothed with a kiss, featherlight, and as she works her way down his body, her mouth gentles more and more. Softly, she sucks at a nipple, circles her tongue around the edge … Playfully, she nips at his ribcage, making him chuckle and jump. His hands gather her hair at her crown, following her down. Till he’s quivering beneath her, till he’s moaning, the sound pleasure and agony all in one. Anna presses a kiss, deep and lingering, into the hair at the base of his cock.

The scent there is warm, pleasantly earthy, in the way that forests smell pleasant, or barns freshly filled with clean hay. She breathes it in deeply and feels her cheek graze his prick, so hard and smooth. He twitches when she presses her lips to the side of it, inhales sharp as a knife, and she fantasizes about someday bringing him to the breaking point with the taste of saltwater on her tongue.

 _Tonight_ , however. Tonight, her cunny is slick and aching. Her breasts feel luxuriously heavy and full. And the only thing more striking than the sight of Edmund Hewlett in her bed to begin with is the unguarded sweetness of his eyelashes fluttering over those broad, beautiful cheeks.

So Anna slides her thighs astraddle Edmund’s and sinks down to meet him heart to heart.

 

\---

 

“Are you … preparing to travel somewhere?” he ventures afterward, hours later, as they curl with their legs entwined at the ankle and her cheek pillowed upon his chest. For a moment, Anna remains silent. His heart beats under her ear. There’s no hint of panic in its rhythm, nor in the rising and falling of his chest, which makes her feel as though she’s lying upon the ocean and being rocked to sleep by the waves. But his tone is delicate enough that she takes pause. So he did not, after all, fail to notice the mess she’s made of her belongings, nor how much is already stashed away inside her trunk … and now he’s wondering what it means.

For her. For him. For _them_. For now that they lay in the cooling afterglow of their impulsiveness with their bodies finally at rest, their minds have too much freedom to whir.

Once, she might have lied to spare his feelings. Never again. “I intended to leave.”

“Strong Manor?”

“Setauket. Long Island. All of it. For good.”

His fingers, laced atop his stomach with hers, tighten an almost imperceptible amount. “...I see.”

 _There is still_ , thinks Anna, nuzzling her cheek into his clavicle, _so much to discuss_. Already, they’ve spent an hour or so in languid conversation, oft lapsing into caresses or a kiss, their starry whispers rendered so shameless by the lateness of the hour and by the act that her heart feels as stripped naked as her flesh. Anna aches in a different way now, equally pleasant. The air is cold on her bare skin, but when she can’t bear it, she just nestles more snugly into Edmund’s side. It is more than she ever dared hope to have from him. A moment that they’ve had to beat the odds time and time again to reach, battling danger, distance, misunderstanding, and betrayal every step of the way. And somehow, against all expectation and sense, here they are. Yet there is still so much distance to recover, and so many wounds to lance, and bandage, and heal.

How stunning, though, simply to have the chance.

“Of course,” she says, with a slight smile, “it’s been an eventful evening,” and his chest shakes with mirth.

“Well. If you could, ah. Be persuaded, perhaps, to put off your journey a little longer … I’m anticipating clear skies tomorrow night. I thought I might spend some time at the telescope, revisit some old friends.” His hand, so large and square and captivating, folds over hers; his heart is rapid beneath her ear. “It would. It would make me very _happy_. If you would care to spend some time at the telescope as well.”

A pause, and when he speaks again, she can hear the smile in it, tentative but true. “...We can devise new names for the stars.”

And Anna smiles as well, full and brilliantly, and tips her face upward to kiss his jaw. There is still so much to talk about. And they will. The dawn will come, the days will pass, the wheels of history and heaven alike turning round and round inevitably in their course. Always moving forward, yet always returning, in some strange and echoing fashion, to the things and people that matter most.

But for now, for tonight, it is enough simply to lie with fingers entwining and know that whatever future is wheeling toward them will find Anna Strong and Edmund Hewlett hand in hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I always feel a bit silly when I write the more erotic stuff, but here we go! Thank you SO MUCH for reading, everybody. Thank you so much for caring about these two as much as I do. I would love to hear your thoughts, and you can find more Turn content from me on tumblr at @calamity-bean.


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